his greatest pretend
by dotRHEA
Summary: - led him to the Darling girl's window once again


Her words had seeped through the boys like diluted ichor; spinning tales of apples and arrows. Her fingers quivered like shaky branches tugging bowstrings, but she could spin tales just as well as her skirts had twirled and danced among the flames. They licked his skin raw but she was there bare and soul like hot embers.

The stars had shone brightly above their heads that night; innocently twinkling like specks of snow as Altair crossed the bridge to Vega. Her lips were chapped dry and his eyes shut as he listened to her light snores.

The flames swallowed her whole soon after.

Desperation was never a pretty face but she wore it like her one of her dresses- all decorated and simple and becoming. Her eyes were worn old, the stories longing for home the more she told them. He grew daggers for words but her retaliation was stale and bubbled yet.

All until that dreaded hour struck its eleventh hand and he knew.

Wendy Darling was poison.

She killed everything she touched- her stories like feathered sails that brought ships to dreaded lands. Her smooth fingers left marks all over the forest, stripping it bare of its bark and leaving an empty hole that the Neverlandian water could never fill. She was the sun to the moon; she pulled and tugged at the tides and drowned everyone in her sticky black pitch.

The lanterns never lit up the same way when silence finally fell on the camp; the torches never set him ablaze as much as she left every wound fester with every day that passed in her wake. Her footsteps were chicken scratch to Neverland's grand canvas; the waves only dragged her further to sea.

The Darling girl bought something unspeakable to Neverland and the price paid was something far from letting her toxic seep out from his cuts and bruises.

She was the wish and price that Pan could not allow exist on his island.

Peter had breathed sweet lies into her ears, saw her blush and dance and giggle; Pan saw her fester and bruise and sacrifice things she was never meant to sacrifice.

But ever the martyr she was, he knew like he knew his own name that the window would always stay open. Waiting for a lost boy with a cowardly father and a fate too grand to leave any space for her in the equation.

In fact, she didn't quite fit in anywhere anyways and Peter had wanted to laugh at the poisonous girl at the sight of her lovelost eyes bubbling up with tears and earth splitting sobs. Her hands shielding her small face, crumbling at the side of a made bed that's been three months empty. Her shoulders tremble like the world left her plummeting down to her feathery death.

_Wendybird_- was what the boys used to call her, back when she used to fleet around through the forest and hover about like a hummingbird. She squealed tweets and her cheeks were colored rosy as if she flew around so much that the wind burned her from smiling the way she smiled.

Peter watches her wings clip away each passing day by that open window.

There's no one home, he knows that and heck even the neighbors know it. There's a letter in between her digits and he could already feel the familiar pulling.

But he can't have this again.

Not _this_.

The letter, Pan concludes, is bad news and he knows it like he knows what's in the letter word for word. Not because he had went and looked behind her back but because at the generous age of thirteen, the darling girl was a socialite bred for London society.

But she was far from the lady that she wanted to be and the night Bae tried to keep her from going away with his shadow, he had helped tug her away and ground her in his land of dreams.

But birds were never meant to be caged.

And Wendy Darling was meant to grow up.

She was poison, toxic to the Neverland soil. She corroded the roots of his tree and her eyes matched his mischievous twinkle every time she heard his pipe reverberate through the air.

Her innocent eyes pierced through his as if asking for a different fate.

But somewhere she knew

and somewhere he knew

that fate never played fair.

"You," it was barely an audible gasp, a guarded whisper as her fleeting eyes shot open and wide. Like a shadow had come and sucked her dry.

Like _his_ shadow had come to suck her dry.

She glared at him with as much ferocity her small fragile _human_ body could muster. The letter had been shoved underneath Baelfire's bed and the windows slammed shut as he trudged forward.

"Me," he smirked and he could already just smell her intoxicating fear.

"But Bae made sure that you would leave us well enough alone," her voice quivered just as her fingers did that day with the bow and god's brittle fruit, because she knew that nothing could keep him out.

She knew it was all just a game and that nothing was stopping him from twisting words the way children jumped rope.

Pan wanted to laugh at the sight of the poisonous girl balling herself further into her skirts. New tears were beginning to bubble up in her eyes and he stared for the longest time before the windows flung open once again and all the sweet winds and autumn leaves swept in like a sick cacophony of farewells she would never give.

"You said you didn't want me."

Her skin was the adulteration to Neverland's pure spring; it burned his fingers and left him with a bitter taste as he pulled her to her feet. The action was sickly reminiscent to a time when the pipes had enchanted her sunkissed lips and her sweet laugh was his salvation to the dark dark nights once upon a time.

The words burnt like hot cinnamon in his throat, and her poison worked its way back into his blood as he pretended the words he had said long long ago were never said in the first place.

"I don't."


End file.
